Thesis Workshop

Authoritarian Political Economy

How Authoritarian Propaganda Adapts to Backlash: Evidence from China

Research Question

When propaganda encounters backlash from the public, how does the authoritarian regime adapt its propaganda strategies?

Literature Review

While a substantial body of research has highlighted the effectiveness of authoritarian pro- paganda in shaping the information landscape and swaying public opinion (Huang, 2015; Weiss and Dafoe, 2019; Carter and Carter, 2021; Mattingly and Yao, 2022; Pan et al., 2022; Rozenas and Stukal, 2019) and limitations (Huang, 2018; Liao and Hwang, 2022; Potter and Wang, 2022), how the authoritarian propaganda adapts to backlashes have been understudied.

Cases from Shanghai

Data and Variables Buindling

We collected propaganda data from street-level bureaucracy WeChat accounts, correlating over 90000 posts with over 5000 citizen petitions from February to May, both by date and street.

Read Count

Propaganda

Petition

Topic Modeling and Textual Similarity based on Sentence Transformer

  • We used Structural Topic Modeling (STM) and BERTopic to detect if the petitions and propaganda posts are related.

  • We used the similarity score based on the Sentence Transformer to capture the dynamics of propaganda.

TWFE

Marginal Effect